Why China is fixated on the Moon: The Moon could be a “beautiful” source of minerals and energy, a top Chinese scientist has told the BBC. Exotic materials including helium-3 and the potential for solar power could prove invaluable for humankind, he says. – by David Shukman – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/25141597

Google files for patent on automated status updates to other social networks — Tech News and Analysis: In the dystopian novel The Circle, Google and Facebook have merged with other big tech companies to create a single, all-seeing and all-knowing social network. The work is fiction but a new patent application published last week makes the situation slightly less far-fetched. – by Jeff John Roberts – Tags: Google,patents,social networks – http://gigaom.com/2013/11/30/google-files-for-patent-on-automated-status-updates-to-other-social-networks/

Is it OK to torture or murder a robot?: We form such strong emotional bonds with machines that people can’t be cruel to them even though they know they are not alive. So should robots have rights? Kate Darling likes to ask you to do terrible things to cute robots. – Tags: BBC, Future, Technology, Artificial intelligence, Robot, Science & Environment, Psychology – http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131127-would-you-murder-a-robot/all

The fall (and rise?) of Yahoo: How the web giant crumbled and built some great tech in the process: At one point not so long ago, Yahoo was one of the top technology companies in the world. “The only exception [was] Google,” Bassel Ojjeh, a former senior vice president of data technologies and products at Yahoo, said in a recent interview. “… That’s where big data came from. – by Derrick Harris – Tags: big data,content personalization,Hadoop,search engines,targeted-advertising,Yahoo – http://gigaom.com/2013/11/27/the-fall-and-rise-of-yahoo-tech/